The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP for short) provides a connection-oriented byte stream service, where a terminal and a server may normally send data to each other after a connection is established, and data transmission performed by using the TCP protocol employs a packet acknowledgement mechanism and a retransmission function. In a downlink TCP service, the server sends a packet to the terminal, the terminal returns an acknowledgement packet to the server after receiving the packet, and the server sends a remaining packet according to the received acknowledgement packet. Due to advantages of the TCP service, the use of the TCP is gradually extending beyond traditional wired transmission services and starts to be seen in wireless transmission services.
In the prior art, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP for short) was developed and designed for wired transmission. After TCP/IP is introduced to a wireless system, for example, a long term evolution (Long Term Evolution, LTE for short) system, limitations of wireless communication result in a fluctuation of air-interface signals, and the server may not receive, within several milliseconds or hundreds of milliseconds, any acknowledgement packet returned by the terminal. After the fluctuation of air-interface signals disappears, the server receives a large quantity of acknowledgement packets within a short period of time. Consequently, in the prior art, lack of differentiated processing upon arrival of a new acknowledgement packet may lead to a problem that the server delivers a large quantity of packets to the terminal according to the large quantity of received acknowledgement packets. Similarly, for uplink data transmission, the same problem may also exist when the terminal sends a packet to the server.